Colonialism and the Emergence of Science Fiction (Early Classics of Science Fiction) - Softcover

Rieder, John

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0819568740 ISBN 13: 9780819568748

Verlag: Wesleyan University Press, 2008

Inhaltsangabe

Groundbreaking study of science fiction's relation to colonialism and imperialism

This is the first full-length study of emerging Anglo-American science fiction's relation to the history, discourses, and ideologies of colonialism and imperialism. Nearly all scholars and critics of early science fiction acknowledge that colonialism is an important and relevant part of its historical context, and recent scholarship has emphasized imperialism's impact on late Victorian Gothic and adventure fiction and on Anglo-American popular and literary culture in general. John Rieder argues that colonial history and ideology are crucial components of science fiction's displaced references to history and its engagement in ideological production. He proposes that the profound ambivalence that pervades colonial accounts of the exotic "other" establishes the basic texture of much science fiction, in particular its vacillation between fantasies of discovery and visions of disaster. Combining original scholarship and theoretical sophistication with a clearly written presentation suitable for students as well as professional scholars, this study offers new and innovative readings of both acknowledged classics and rediscovered gems.

Includes discussion of works by Edwin A. Abbott, Edward Bellamy, Edgar Rice Burroughs, John W. Campbell, George Tomkyns Chesney, Arthur Conan Doyle, H. Rider Haggard, Edmond Hamilton, W. H. Hudson, Richard Jefferies, Henry Kuttner, Alun Llewellyn, Jack London, A. Merritt, Catherine L. Moore, William Morris, Garrett P. Serviss, Mary Shelley, Olaf Stapledon, and H. G. Wells.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

JOHN RIEDER is a professor of English at the University of Hawai'i at M¯anoa.

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Colonialism and the Emergence of Science Fiction

By John Rieder

Wesleyan University Press

Copyright © 2008 John Rieder
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-8195-6874-8

Contents

List of Illustrations, 
Acknowledgments, 
Chapter 1 Introduction: The Colonial Gaze and the Frame of Science Fiction, 
Chapter 2 Fantasies of Appropriation: Lost Races and Discovered Wealth, 
Chapter 3 Dramas of Interpretation, 
Chapter 4 Artificial Humans and the Construction of Race, 
Chapter 5 Visions of Catastrophe, 
Notes, 
Works Cited, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

The Colonial Gaze and the Frame of Science Fiction

The question organizing this book concerns the connection between the early history of the genre of English-language science fiction and the history and discourses of colonialism. Consider first a brief example. Those searching out the origins of science fiction in English have often pointed to classical and European marvelous journeys to other worlds as an important part of its genealogy (e.g., Philmus 37–55; Aldiss 67–89; Stableford 18–23). It makes sense that if science fiction has anything to do with modern science (I am deferring the problem of defining "science fiction" until the fourth section of this chapter), the Copernican shift from a geocentric to a helio-centric understanding of the solar system provides a crucial point where the ancient plot of the marvelous journey starts becoming something like science fiction, because the Copernican shift radically changed the status of other worlds in relation to our own. An Earth no longer placed at the center of the universe became, potentially, just one more among the incalculable plurality of worlds. Of all the marvelous journeys to other worlds written in Galileo's seventeenth century, Cyrano de Bergerac's The Comical History of the States and Empires of the Moon and the Sun (first translated into English in 1656) is the one that science fiction scholars have expressed the greatest admiration for (see Suvin, Metamorphoses of Science Fiction 103–106). All the scholars I've cited would agree that the main work of Cyrano's satire is hardly a matter of celestial mechanics, however. Its crux is the way it mocks, parodies, criticizes, and denaturalizes the cultural norms of his French contemporaries. The importance of his satire has far less to do with Copernicus's taking the Earth out of the center of the solar system than with Cyrano's taking his own culture out of the center of the human race, making it no longer definitive of the range of human possibilities.

The example of Cyrano suggests that the disturbance of ethnocentrism, the achievement of a perspective from which one's own culture is only one of a number of possible cultures, is as important a part of the history of science fiction, as much a condition of possibility for the genre's coming to be, as developments in the physical sciences. The achievement of an estranged, critical perspective on one's home culture always has been one of the potential benefits of travel in foreign lands. In the fifteenth and the sixteenth centuries, Europeans greatly expanded the extent and the kinds of contacts they had with the non-European world. Between the time of Cyrano and that of H. G. Wells, those contacts enveloped the world in a Europe-centered system of commerce and political power. Europeans mapped the non-European world, settled colonies in it, mined it and farmed it, bought and sold some of its inhabitants, and ruled over many others. In the process of all of this, they also developed a scientific discourse about culture and mankind. Its understanding of human evolution and the relation between culture and technology played a strong part in the works of Wells and his contemporaries that later came to be called science fiction.

Evolutionary theory and anthropology, both profoundly intertwined with colonial ideology and history, are especially important to early science fiction from the mid-nineteenth century on. They matter first of all as conceptual material. Ideas about the nature of humankind are central to any body of literature, but scientific accounts of humanity's origins and its possible or probable futures are especially basic to science fiction. Evolutionary theory and anthropology also serve as frameworks for the Social Darwinian ideologies that pervade early science fiction. The complex mixture of ideas about competition, adaptation, race, and destiny that was in part generated by evolutionary theory, and was in part an attempt to come to grips with — or to negate — its implications, forms a major part of the thematic material of early science fiction. These will be recurrent topics of discussion in Colonialism and the Emergence of Science Fiction.

The thesis that colonialism is a significant historical context for early science fiction is not an extravagant one. Indeed, its strong foundation in the obvious has been well recognized by scholars of science fiction. Most historians of science fiction agree that utopian and satirical representations of encounters between European travelers and non-Europeans — such as Thomas More's Utopia (1516), Cyrano's Comical History, and Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels (1726) — form a major part of the genre's prehistory. Scholars largely (though not universally) agree that the period of the most fervid imperialist expansion in the late nineteenth century is also the crucial period for the emergence of the genre (Suvin, Victorian Science Fiction in the UK 325–26; Clareson, Some Kind of Paradise 4; James, "Science Fiction by Gaslight" 34–35; for one who disagrees, see Delany, Silent Interviews 25–27). Science fiction comes into visibility first in those countries most heavily involved in imperialist projects — France and England — and then gains popularity in the United States, Germany, and Russia as those countries also enter into more and more serious imperial competition (Csicsery-Ronay 231). Most important, no informed reader can doubt that allusions to colonial history and situations are ubiquitous features of early science fiction motifs and plots. It is not a matter of asking whether but of determining precisely how and to what extent the stories engage colonialism. The work of interpreting the relation of colonialism and science fiction really gets under way, then, by attempting to decipher the fiction's often distorted and topsy-turvy references to colonialism. Only then can one properly ask how early science fiction lives and breathes in the atmosphere of colonial history and its discourses, how it reflects or contributes to ideological production of ideas about the shape of history, and how it might, in varying degrees, enact a struggle over humankind's ability to reshape it.

From Satirical Reversal to Anthropological Difference

We can start from Edward Said's argument in Culture and Imperialism that "the novel, as a cultural artefact of bourgeois society, and imperialism are unthinkable without each other" (70–71). His thesis is that the social space of the novel, which defines the possibilities allowed to its characters and the limits suffered by them, is involved inextricably with Western Europe's project of global expansion and control over non-European territories and cultures from the eighteenth century to the present. One could no more separate the psychological and domestic spaces represented in the novel from this emerging sense of a world knit together...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Wesleyan University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2008
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0819568740
• ISBN 13: 9780819568748
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 183
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Buchbär; info@buchbaer.de; ; Weberstr. 67; Osnabrück; 49084; Deutschland